Professional Social Support Seeking Behavior And Its Influencing Factors Among Patients With Cancer

Objective The purpose of this study was to investigate the professional social support seeking behavior and its influencing factors among patients with cancer, analyze the path relationship among variables, clarify the main influencing factors, and thus to provide references for clinical intervention program.Methods Convenience sampling method was used to recruit patients with cancer from December 2014 to September 2015 in two tertiary hospitals of Anhui medical university. The general information questionnaire, cancer patients seeking professional social support behavior questionnaire that based on the theory of planned behavior, the Big Five personality questionnaire (Big Five Inventory, BFI) were distributed among patients with different types of cancer. EpiData3.1 software was used for data entry, SPSS 17.0 software for data analysis, and AMOS21.0 software for analysis the path relationship of the influence factors.Results Professional social support seeking behavior questionnaire for patients with cancer has good reliability and validity. Findings showed that younger cancer patients were more likely to seek professional social support than older patients. In the theory of planned behavior, intention has a positive effect to cancer patients on seeking professional social support, path coefficientβ=0.200 (t=3.077, P=0.002). Attitude has a positive effect on intention, path coefficientβ=0.560 (t=4.463,P<0.001). Subjective norm has a positive effect on intention, path coefficientβ=0.205 (t=1.967, P=0.048) Subjective norm has a positive effect on attitude, path coefficientβ=0.716 (t=5.676, P<0.001), and perceived behavioral control has a positive effect on attitude, path coefficientβ=0.476 (t=4.080, P<0.001). The affective attitude has a positive effect on seeking professional social support behavior, path coefficient β=0.157 (t=2.427, P=0.015). Conscientiousness, extraversion and agreeableness have direct or indirect effect on seeking professional social support behavior. The conscientiousness has a negative effect on seeking professional social support behavior, path coefficientβ=-0.175 (t=-2.834, P=0.005). The extraversion has a positive effect on subjective norm, path coefficientβ=0.309 (t=3.983, P<0.001). The extraversion has a positive effect on perceived behavioral control, path coefficientp=0.292 t=3.183, P=0.001). The extraversion has a negative effect on attitude, path coefficientβ=-0.194 (t=-2.017, P=0.044). The agreeableness have a positive effect on attitude, path coefficientβ=0.253 (t=3.196, P=0.001). Subjective norm and perceived behavior control play a complete mediation effect between extraversion and attitude. Conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioral control can explain 10.4% of the behavioral variance and 52.2% of the intention variance.Conclusion The research result showed that the theory of planned behavior has a good predictive power on predicting of cancer patients in seeking professional social support. Attitude and subjective norm are the main influence factors for cancer patients in seeking professional social support. Attitude, subjective norm have positive prediction function on intention, intention has positive prediction function on behavior and perceived behavioral control can indirectly influence behavior intention and behavior in seeking professional social support through directly influence attitude. Agreeableness personality has a positive effect on attitude in seeking professional social support. Extraversion has a positive effect on subjective norm and perceived behavior control. Conscientiousness has a negative effect on seeking professional social support. It can provide references for health care personnel to help patients enhance intentions and improve behaviors of seeking professional social support by finding the main influence factors for cancer patients in seeking professional social support.